Students Pressure Colleges to Buy Green Power

By 2004, the student government voted to quadruple their purchase to almost 9 million kilowatt-hours, which provides for approximately 8 percent of the school’s total energy needs.

"Certainly, colleges make up a significant portion of the institutions that we sell to," says Paul Copleman, manager of operations at Community Energy Inc. , a marketer of wind power based in Pennsylvania. Copleman says the company made its first wind farm sale to Carnegie Mellon University four years ago and since then at least 50 colleges have purchased wind and other forms of green energy for the first time.

"There has been a rush of green-power purchases made by colleges in recent years," says a representative of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership program, "and the size of their purchases is absolutely remarkable."

Green power is electricity created from clean, renewable and natural resources such as wind, water and the sun. A utility’s power grid uses the energy released from these sources, along with energy generated by fossil fuels, in order to create the electricity that powers our homes. The overall goal is to reduce the use of fossil fuels – such as coal and oil – that have adverse effects on the earth’s atmosphere.

Fossil fuels are a finite resource and are therefore not sustainable. Alternative energy should play a growing role in trimming our dependency on harmful fossil fuels."
-Nisha Shah, student at University of Pennsylvania and co-president
of the Penn Environmental Group

Following in the footsteps of the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Pennsylvania, in 2001, purchased 20 million kilowatt-hours of electricity generated by wind power. In 2003, the university doubled its wind power purchase to 40 million kilowatt-hours. The university’s total wind energy production now accounts for over 10 percent of the campus’ energy needs.

"We are now the highest institutional purchasers of wind power in the US," says Shah.
Other renewable sources play a significant role in bringing green power to college campuses. In 2003, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles installed a 500, 000 square-foot solar electric rooftop system on two of its buildings, which makes it the site of the largest solar rooftop system of any university in the world. Each year the system generates over 868,000 kilowatt-hours of energy and provides for roughly 26 percent of the total energy used at the university.